Rayiner, 70% of respondents in the last Oak Park election voted against "defunding" the Oak Park police. Biden carried Oak Park with 90% of our vote. He ran on fully funding the police; his campaign literally rebuked the "defund" movement. This simply isn't a partisan issue; it's a Twitter Elite issue that you elevate to beat up on. Yes, it is exclusively Democratic elites pushing "defund", just like it is exclusively Republicans pushing Catholic Integralism. It would be dishonest of me to claim that Catholic Integralism defines the Republican party.

You have a point with immigration! But you overplay your hand with the defund stuff. Democratic candidates who run on "defund" lose their primary elections everywhere except a tiny number of ultra-blue uncompetitive districts.

I’d probably vote for defund, from the safety of my Larry Hogan +30 suburb. I’m harping about it because it exemplifies the practice of invoking minorities as involuntary political surrogates by calling policies—in that case policing or stopping riots—“racist dog whistles.”

It’s not just the Twitter elite doing that—it’s a lot of folks who don’t necessarily want to defund the police, but just wanted an opportunity to call republicans racist. But the end result is that we went about a year invoking minorities to attack policies that the minorities themselves supported, which is gross. The underlying practice needs to stop.

You'd be wildly out of step with the Democrats in your suburb, because "defund" is unpopular everywhere. It's a fringe idea.

Granted the let's get rid of all police was fringe. But the let's have fewer police officers and more counselors and call that defunding the police was pretty popular. At least among my friend group in Houston, and it was especially popular among the more politically engaged of my friends, the ones more likely to volunteer or vote in a primary.

It's easy to find groups of people online who believe in getting rid of all the police, and even easier to find people in favor of reducing the number of police (before this issue became a political football, reducing police headcount was a bipartisan idea in local politics, as was pushing back on their unions). But where the issue has been put to the test with real voters, it has failed dramatically.

That the primary system elevates fringe candidates is, yes, a problem. But those candidates lose.

Like I said, we have an exceptionally mobilized defund movement in Oak Park, with demonstrations, proposed ordinances, and candidate slates. They got slaughtered. We're a single-party municipality; being outed as in any way sympathetic to Republicans is fatal here. It came to nothing: liberals don't want to defund the police.

More importantly, "defund" is a fringe idea among Black people. This is the important aspect of the point I'm trying to make. Through BLM, progressive activists hijacked the broader call among Black people for police reform to push a fringe idea that Black people themselves didn't support. To do that, they weaponized accusations of racism. The New York Times fired an editor for publishing an Op-Ed by Tom Cotton that advocated doing basically the same thing Larry Hogan did in Baltimore in 2015, which caused his approval rating to skyrocket to over 70% in the majority Black city.

Faced with that, Democrats in 2020 did not treat the idea as "fringe." The put up the BLM signs on their yards and didn't say a word against the activists promoting defund. Aside from Joe Biden, prominent Democrats equivocated when confronted directly: Elizabeth Warren responded to a question about "defund" by saying "it's not the term I would use." That's not how you describe what you think is a "fringe" idea.

I feel like all I see you post now is political trolling, which is too bad. "Leading poll questions influence people's answers" isn't exactly hard hitting insight, and that opinion piece is literally about effective ways of reframing discussions to get popular support for different policies, bringing into question how much of this is really "listen[in] to its voters" at all.

You’ve got it backwards. The poll asks simple direct questions that reveal voter preferences. The article is about how to reframe those questions to get voters to give the answers progressives want.

I’m not “trolling.” In the last few years folks have become too comfortable calling policies “racist” or “dog whistling” without being confident that minorities actually perceive them that way. I think this is itself racist and manipulative—a way of fluffing apparent support for progressive policies by vaguely invoking minorities—and needs to be called out as such.

Cross-border criminal activity is a real concern that affects real people. There’s a reason majority Hispanic communities along the border have flipped Republican in the last couple of years. Right now Abbott is leading Beto among Hispanics in reputable polls: https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2022/01/29/abbott-r.... Waving your hands and calling these concerns racist “dog whistles” is not only lazy but disrespectful to a distinct community with its own interests and often nuanced positions.

> Nope.

Yes, you can get results from push-polling with heavily loaded wording and unsubstantiated, hyperbolic claims like "overrun with drugs and criminal gangs" and correlating police funding to public safety.

Yes, that's different from evidence-based policy.

Yes, the Texas state governement has enacted a program of disenfranchisement.